top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway."
Standard
Customized
More
"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
Author Name
Personal Development
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
Author Name
Personal Development
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia."
Kids
"Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic."
Description
"The death of a young person for no reason is an apocalypse."
Mortality
"I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway."
Literature
"You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that's the same as going there."
Travel
"Suffering is only suffering if it's done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion."
Sacrifice
"You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right?"
Knowledge
"It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it."
Psychology
"Surveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get."
Surveillance
"You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time."
Time
bottom of page